Good God, There Are A Lot of Kickstarter Projects In the Pipeline

There's gold in them there crowdfunded projects.

Looks like Kickstarter just had a slight hiccup on its path to complete world domination. The Wall Street Journal reports that an April site update introduced a bug exposing the details of unlaunched projects.

The company confessed: “The bug made accessible the project description, goal, duration, rewards, video, image, location, category, and user name for unlaunched projects. No account or financial data was made accessible.” That means no credit card numbers and no addresses. There’s probably no reason to worry if your graphic novel zombie rom-com reinterpretation of Moll Flanders wasn’t quite ready for primetime, either. Kickstarter estimates that, discounting downloads by the Journal reporter who found the bug, a mere 48 projects were seen.

But check out how many unlaunched projects are apparently kicking around the pipes:

The Journal was able to download nearly 77,000 of Kickstarter’s most recent projects and drafts, dating back to mid-March, before Kickstarter plugged the security hole around 1:40pm Eastern on Friday.

To put that into perspective, the New York Times’ splashy April feature on the company put the number of total projects to-date around 50,000. There’s no telling how solid that 77,000 number is–perhaps a substantial number are utter crap, or abandoned, or some sort of duplicate profile. But we also wonder how many are newly added hardware startups.

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